Classic Poem

You who were never afraid of truth or doubt,
Only saying "The light in the soul is real,
The spirit of grace is true, the lamp is not put out."
I must follow forever your white ideal.

Splendor amid the smoke and the dust and vapor,
Truth through the litter of lies and rubble of dreams,
Mutable yet immutable; changed, and the shaper
Of all that light in the mind that steadily gleams!

So--words fail, and run to ironic length;
Like panting breath the phrases quiver and fade.
And the heart unthought-of throbs its appalling strength--
Tireless--till it too in the dust is laid.

But something lives--say there is something lives!
Our passion it is, all of our will to be--
Something in men like a rout of fugitives
Hurrying on the shore of a phantom sea,

Hurrying, wailing, questing, seeing the moon
Light that waste of beauty and terror and plangent sound;
Knowing the tide creeps on, and that soon, too soon,
All of the torches and all of the flowers lie drowned

Yet that that sea moves not of its movement only,
All of the dim vast force is motes that blend,
Each still striving and still secure and lonely
Unto some end, some great mysterious end.

You who were never afraid of truth or doubt--
Granted that truth we know!--oh, eyes of mine,
Eyes in my soul that will never glimmer out,--
This is my soul's ebb-tide, but I make the Sign!